Completing the Circle

I am currently sitting back in the Organization’s hostel in the very same room that housed me for three extremely long months two years ago. To help make us feel even more at home, we even attended the campus bar’s Nyama Choma night for dinner on Friday: the barman recognized me and even remembered my drink of choice. It was as if we had never left.

Getting to this point, however, took three VERY long days, which I hope never, ever, ever to repeat. The air movers, if you remember, were first on the schedule with Wednesday put aside for their packing. Their “packing,” however, turned my hair grey and freaked the freak right out of me.

With little to no regard for our possessions or how heavy the boxes were getting, they threw items into tall (mid-chest level) boxes saying that they would repack them later. The icing on the cake of these 200-pound boxes was how they treated my DVDs – they literally put them into trash bags. When I pointed out that this was not the appropriate way to treat expensive items and that the bags could break, I was given one of “those” looks and told that the bags wouldn’t break and that they knew what they were doing. “Those bags break when I put trash in them!” I exclaimed.

Their packing skills having turned my empty stomach, I elected to follow them to their airport-area offices to supervise the re-packing. The warehouse we pulled up to was filled with pallets of Tiger beer and cases of good South African wine. I kept trying to sneak one of the cases into my purse but they were well guarded against covetous drunks like me.

Thankfully, this turned out to be a very relieving exercise. The packing manager, Mo, was incredibly professional and had his guys bubble wrapping my DVDs and carefully folding our clothes into boxes. It was a huge relief to know that our things would be taken care of better by this gentleman than they had by his careless employees.

Luckily, the remainder of Wednesday was far more successful than the morning had been, as we even found someone who may purchase our car, Storm. Even better, Hubby took me out for drinks to help me drown my stress in Margaritas. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s stories about the two-day drama that was our sea freight pack-out.